The Death Ride is nearly here! Woohoo!

Long time since I’ve posted in this blog. I’ve had blog-worthy things to say, but without photos I’ve sent those messages out via email, as it’s easier that way. For anyone reading this who, for some reason, ISN’T someone I know and didn’t get those emails… well, you missed out.

Specifically:

A post-ride recap on the Tierra Bella Century ride from April with buddies Andy and Dave. We had a great time on that one. That was my first century completed. Good fun. Paced w/ Mr. Dave and toodled up the climbs. Then we went into Overdrive towards the finish, which of course meant we were going too fast and missed a turn, got slightly off track and found our way back into the event. Woops!

Another recap of the Sequoia Century from May. 114 miles, rode a little harder on that one and did it solo this time, but it was excellent training. (photo below)

Right after that was the Near Death Experience Training Camp up at Kirkwood. That was an epically BAD experience as I wound up with stomach flu on the first day and had to struggle through the whole weekend. Ergh. Still, I managed to ride everything except the climb up Carson, so I’ve scouted the course.

I also did a 114-mile solo ride one weekend. That was a treat. Riding that far with no sag-support meant I was always on the lookout for drinks, food and bathrooms. Did 11,600 feet of climbing that day. Pretty tired by the end of it, but feeling good about the accomplishment. Rode up Montebello Road, then over Page Mill Road, down Alpine to Pescadero, turned around and climbed back the way I came, then did Old La Honda to Skyline, descended and made my way back to Los Gatos. That ride was one of my goals from back in the beginning, so I got to check that box off.

This last Saturday I rode the Giro di Pennisula with a neighbor, Mike. His son was in my daughter’s Kindergarten class and we discovered on the final day of school that we were both doing the Death Ride this year. He’s quite the monster rider and finished the Giro in first place for the 100-milers with a 5 hour, 58 minute time.  He did the same thing at another century earlier in the month. Hardcore. He dropped me and his friend John around mile… three. lol. John and I rode together for most of the event. The 3 of us are heading up to the Death Ride together. Should be fun.

On Sunday I was back on the bike for a 40-miler out to Montebello and then home. This time I took my camera with me, as I wanted to see if I could manage to take it along on the Death Ride. No problems. I even made a little video.

Got one more weekend of training to do and then it’s off to the big show. Can’t believe it’s nearly here as I’ve spent 6+ months getting ready for this thing.  According to my ride diary… from Feb. 1st through today I’ve ridden 3,150 miles and climbed 210,000 feet. Dang… probably should have got out there a little more.

Sequoia Century @ 100-mile mark:

Roughly half-way up Montebello. Trying out the camera from the saddle:

Video from the saddle. I’m having some trouble with Youtube, so if you can’t see this properly, then try viewing at my Photobucket location:

http://s61.photobucket.com/albums/h69/Talarius/Cycling/?action=view&current=June2008_127.flv

Long waits at line for new blog post.

Hi guys,

Sorry for the delay in getting a new blog post up. I’ll write something later today asap. Short version is that this last weekend Dave K. and I went out for a 55-miler along the pennisula.  We got a chance to try out Old La Honda road, cruise along Skyline and try not to get killed descending 84. I suck at descending. Bad!

Weekend before that was the rainy weekend where I went up Hicks Road (insanely steep!) up to Mount Umunhum Road, one of the worst-paved roads I’ve ever seen. Details coming soon.

Brother Sharp had this to report:

So I’m out on a 22 mile easy recovery ride from SLO to Avila Beach and back this morning.  On the way out a member of Team High Road Emilia Fahlin http://www.cyclingnews.com/photos.php?id=/photos/2008/features/highroad_launch08/JD_HRpresent017
rides up from behind me and asks if I can join her on my ride.  She was real nice as I took her down the Bob Jones Trail and offered to take her up Cape Landing Road for a Hill Repeat.  She says “No Hills..We better Stick to Flats ya”  She was doing a 3 hr ride vs. my short 1hr & 20 minute ride.  Come down here and you can train with world class athletes.
Sharp

Nice! I don’t know how the wife would react to me training with this young Swedish lady. I’ll ask her and let you know.

So, more details on those rides coming soon. Hold your breath!

Okay. Let it out.

Training in Style… or Not.

Alright, I’ve been meaning to type this post for a while now and I only have a few minutes, so this’ll be quick.

In my first post I talked about picking up the new Madone 5.1 bike. I’ve been having fun riding this high-tech toy out on the road, but how is it riding on the trainer? Especially on rainy days like we’re having this week? Well, I wouldn’t know, as I’m keeping the Madone on its hook in the rafters when I ride the trainer, sticking to my old Bianchi Premio. This is in part because I’m lazy and can just leave the Bianchi on the trainer all the time, not needing to take the Madone in-and-out of the trainer each time I want to use it. The other reason is, I figure this means less wear and tear on the new bike, extending the life of its various components before I eventually grind them up and have to replace/repair them.

I’ve got a few friends training to do the Tierra Bella century with me in April and one of them went out and bought a new trainer in January. He sent out a picture to”The Brotherhood” showing off his setup:

He did add at the time that he thought riding on the trainer was pretty boring. I thought to myself, “How can this be? He’s got a TV right in front him, plus there’s those speakers there so I assume that’s hooked up to his stereo or maybe even surround sound, the lofty heights of which our household will never reach. Heck, at our house we’re still using the massive stereo speakers I’ve had since I was in junior high school, for crying out loud. Yeah, stereo speakers don’t really start paying for themselves until you’ve been using them for 30+ years. Almost time to upgrade!

Anyway, as long as we were all sharing photos of our trainer setups, I thought I’d show off mine:

Yeah, baby. That’s got “Eye of the Tiger” written all over it, imho. lol. I have to admit that the garage is actually a little cleaner now than it is in this picture, but still. Who’s training in style here? Surround Sound? Who needs that? I’ve got a music stand… with magazines! Woot! Carpeting? I’d just ruin it with pools of sweat; give me icy cold winter concrete. That’s the stuff.

Alright, well, to be 100% honest my #1 saving grace is I listen to podcasts on my iPod, so it’s not completely “Rocky I” out in the garage. I haven’t actually read any magazines out there as the podcasters keep me busy enough. Still, I’m thinking of recruiting the old guy across the street to growl Bronx catch-phrases at me like Burgess Meredith, “You’re gonna eat lightnin’; you’re gonna crap thunder.” Hmm. Maybe not.

On the podcast front, I’ve been listening to “The Fredcast Cycling Podcast” the last couple days. This guy has been interviewing the racers in the Tour of California, including Jackson Stewart, from… Los Gatos! He was the BMC rider on a long break-away on Stage One to Santa Rosa. His interview was pretty interesting as the way he wound up on a solo break sounded unintended and the tactics of how much time he got on the peloton was more deliberate than Phil and Paul might lead you to believe on the TV.

I downloaded another episode with a Tyler Hamilton interview this morning. I’m always interested to see what his status is. That guy has been in limbo for SO long. I can never make my mind up one way or the other, but he’s served his time regardless of what he did, so he might as well be racing. Frankly, I think any revelations that come out of Operation Puerto (and I don’t think there will be any more revelations) are beside the point and double-jeopardy. He’s already been punished, so what’s the point of banning him now? By the way, if you look into how the Puerto case has been reopened, you’ll discover that it has nothing to do with the riders at all this time. It’s all about Fuentes and whether they can file additional charges against him for how he stored the blood. They’re not looking into which athletes were involved so banning various riders from the Tour of California is a bit ridiculous, imho.

Huh. Pretty easy to get on a rant, huh? Sorry. Cheating sucks, by the way.

Okay, I have more to type, but things are getting out of control around here. Gonna have to finish this up later.

Tour of California 2008 Prologue

If I were a hard-core blogger, this post would have gone up last night, but I’ve got a family and all that goes with it, so this was my best opportunity. Within 24 hours is not too bad in my book.

Dave Kascht and I rode up Foothill Expressway to Stanford to watch the Tour of California Prologue yesterday. There were a bunch of cyclists headed that way as well and we got in a little group of 6-7 riders. It was very strange riding so close to other people as I spend 99% of my riding time on my own; I was nervous about banging into someone next to me or colliding into the guy in front of me, but nothing happened. We got on campus and headed to the loop on Palm Drive. The place was packed! No surprise.

Dave took my picture next to the barriers. A month ago I accidentally snapped my regular cycling glasses in half (they’d been sitting out in a freezing cold garage all night and I flexed them too far… doh!) so I’m wearing my very stylish “Super-Cyclops” glasses here. Man, I’ve gotta get some new glasses asap. I look like a super-dork:

We hung out at this spot for 10 minutes or so. I got a few pictures of riders coming through, but we had no idea who they were. Here’s a random Astana rider:

We wandered through the crowd a little, saw Frankie Andreau doing some commentary for TV or a webcast? We went down to the finish line, but it was pretty packed there; couldn’t see much. I took a picture of Dave and the “Un-LeMond”:

We didn’t spend too much time here and headed back up to cross into the middle of the loop where there were fewer people on the barriers. Mario Cippolini went by. I got a picture of him, but it wasn’t that good. Ah well. We got into our new spot where we had a front row spot on the barriers and a good view of the big screen to see who was coming down the road. Dave was a happy man:

This was our hang-out for the rest of the time trial. We saw about 50 riders from this spot, including Oscar Friere, Paolo Bettini, Jens Voight, Bobby Julich, etc. We saw Thomas Voekler go by at least 4 times. lol. Seriously, these guys were going by our barricades so fast that we only saw them for a split second. Some of the bikes would have collided with Dave’s head in that picture above. They were that close. Every time a Bouygues Telecom rider went by, I would say, “That was Thomas Voekler. Oh no, wait.. THAT was Thomas Voekler.” I took about a dozen shots from this spot, but other than one rider spitting the exact moment I took his picture, the rest all look identical except for the team colors. Here’s Fabian Cancellara, world TT champion, followed by George Hincapie and Levi Leipheimer. I have to say that when Fabian went by his bike sounded faster than everyone else’s.

So after Levi pulled into the finish line it was time to go. It was pretty easy to get out of there. So many people came on bikes that the crowd dispersed really quickly. We got in an even bigger peleton on the way home, fluctuating from 8-12 people. I wasn’t comfortable riding too close to the wheel in front of me, I tended to leave at least a 3-4 foot gap. Eventually we got to downtown Los Altos and somehow I was leading the group. We were coming up on a red light at a T-intersection and I thought Dave was right behind me so I asked him, “Are we stopping here or what?” and a totally different voice responded, “It’s a protected intersection, we can just go on through.” There were a half-dozen new riders in our group I hadn’t even realized were there and as I found out later… Dave was at the back of the pack! I pulled off and let these guys go through. I was really glad I’d asked instead of just putting on the brakes and causing a pile-up.

Oh, that reminds me. Apparently cyclists have some kind of secret hand-signal language for pulling up to red lights, ’cause when I was in the middle of the group, some of the more hard-core riders were making signs for the riders behind. I had no frickin’ clue what they were supposed to mean, but I just copied them for the benefit of whoever was behind me. Afterwards I asked Dave about it and he said, “This means slow down, this means we’re stopping, this means look out for that pothole/pinecone/dog poop.” Good to know.

Later that night, I combed through the TV footage from Versus and found myself in the crowd. I’m a greyish blur in a 10th of a second of a shot, but… cool!

So, we got in 21 miles on Sunday and I went out today and did another 30 with 2100 feet of climbing. That’s 101 miles over the last 3 days with 4500+ total climbing. Not too shabby and I forgot to mention that I’ve been sick all weekend. Actually the only times when I haven’t felt like a zombie was when I was out riding, so it’s good I got out so much!

Last shot from the prologue. This guy was riding around a crowd of pedestrians, bikes, kids, dogs, skateboards, etc. on a 7-foot unicycle. Crazy. He also had massive calf muscles.

Thanks for reading. I’ll post again soon!

Half-century Star-gazing

Got back from my longest ride ever a couple hours ago: 50 miles. A half-century. Nice.

I went out for an easy training ride with my buddy Dave K., who’ll be riding the Tierra Bella in April with me. I drove up to his place in Sunnyvale and we got ready to head out on a low-key ride up to Palo Alto, then off to Woodside, Canada Road, back through Portola Valley and return to Sunnyvale. Dave was riding his well-maintained LeMond bike, but I noticed something had changed since the last time I saw it: all the “LeMond” stickers were missing. “Yeah, I decided to pull ‘em off ’cause he’s such a whiner.” I thought this was pretty funny as I’d read an article in the Mercury News about LeMond this morning and been debating it with my wife. If everything he says in the story is true, then I think he’s got good reason to complain… but even so it comes off sounding a bit like sour grapes either way.

Dave and I set out on our ride and I was joking about how slow we were going. My heart rate was far below what it is on my normal rides, where I’m trying to get into the LT zone as much as possible. We were just tooling along, very casual, but as this ride would cover 10 miles more than I’d ever done in my life, I wasn’t complaining. It was very civilized. It was a nice day and there were TONS of people out riding. We got up to Stanford and turned onto Sand Hill Road and started climbing our first semi-existent hill. Dave was joking how I was going to drop him like a rock, so I pulled off at an intersection and let him pass me; then in a total goober-moment I bent low over the handlebars like I was time-trialing and zipped right past him. Immediately after this goofball maneuver I was passed by 2 pro cyclists from a US domestic team (Bissel) and then just after that another pro goes by on a time-trial bike that had to have cost ~$10k. :-0

Yeah, the Tour of California was starting tomorrow at Stanford, so naturally all the pro teams were out on their warm-up rides. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to us that we might see some pros during our ride, but boy, did we ever! Moments after these 3 pros rode past us, Team Highroad came down Sand Hill going the other way, joined with Team Jelly Belly. George Hincapie is on the Highroad team, but I didn’t spot him in the pack of 20+ riders. They went by too fast. A little farther up the road we saw some riders from Webcor (a club/team although they’re not listed in the teams racing), and then Saunier Duval.

We got to a stopsign in Woodside and we can see coming up the hill, Team Quick-Step. We wait a couple seconds and Tom Boonen and Paolo Bettini in his World Champion jersey ride right by us. Further down the road we saw Team BMC drafting really close behind their team car. REALLY close. It looked pretty sketchy, but they also looked like they knew what they were doing. After them came the Rock Racing Team. A bit later an Astana rider came TTing down the road and then just a little ways behind him was a group of Astana riders and their team car. They were going slow enough that I waved to them from across the road and shouted, “good luck!” I got a quick glimpse at the driver of the team car and it sure looked like Johan Bruyneel to me. We saw a few other pros here and there during the ride, but MAN. How cool was that!? It was funny as all the other people riding these roads kept looking at each other to see if they were a pro warming up or another weekend rider. I was definitely rubber-necking too. Much more fun than I was expecting!

The time trial is tomorrow. I may head up there to watch some of it. I’ll have to bring my camera along as I hear these blogs are supposed to have pictures in them to keep in interesting.

The ride itself went fine. Nice and easy. Started feeling it in the legs about 43 miles in or so, just a little fatigue, nothing serious. We did 50 miles on the nose with 2200+ feet of climbing, which was a lot more than I thought it would be as most of the climbs were pretty gentle. Nothing over… 6%. 3 hours 2o minutes of cruising, talking about pro cycling, the Death Ride and Star-gazing. Pretty good for my first half-century!

First Sunny weekend of 2008 + Planning Ahead

This post was supposed to be “Training in Style… Or Not” but I’ll save that one for later, as I wanted to recap my weekend rides and lay out my plans for my first century event, the Tierra Bella ride on April 12th.

Saturday: My wife recently bought a new sewing machine that has some fairly complicated features, so she has an all-day class to attend in order to figure this beast out (it’s twice the size of her previous machine). I am left with the kids for most of the day, one of the first warm sunny weekend days of 2008. The new bike sits in the garage on its hook, mocking me. Fortunately, she’s able to get home in time for me to get out for an hour-and-a-half ride. I head out as fast as I can, zip down to my training road and get in 23 miles before returning home. I’m finding the road pedals very tricky to get into. My old mountain bike clips in on both sides of the pedal, while the road pedals only clip in on one side. Also, if you misalign the shoe, it tends to slip right off the pedal; you can’t get going without clicking in. I have nearly crashed a few times and am having some real difficulty getting used to them. I hope I get better at it soon.

Sunday: Today I have a 40-mile ride planned, primarily flat or small hills, in South San Jose headed towards Morgan Hill on the backroads (McKean Road) but not actually reaching the town. In order to get this training figured out I ordered a couple books on Amazon.com (I’ll edit this post and put the book titles in later), one of them is a book on nutrition and training, while the other is about… training and nutrition! The training book (and my friend, long-distance cycling coach Roger Rintala) says I need to figure out my max heart rate. About 9-10 miles into my ride there’s a short hill that’s got a 10-14% grade, so I go all-out, gasping for air on the way up. My HR monitor peaks at 176, which seems a little low to me, but hey, these are early training days and maybe I could have gone harder. I’ll certainly try again next time and see what I get.

Shortly after this hill, I get out of the suburbs and into the farm/ranch land in South San Jose. It’s really beautiful out here, like out of a guidebook of California. It’s also a little windy, but nothing severe. McKean road is definitely a training road for local cyclists, I probably saw a couple dozen of them out and back (16 miles?). There’s not much of a shoulder and the cars drive fast, so I’m a little nervous about it, but it’s ok. If I had gone out earlier in the day (I was out at noon) there would have been fewer cars… but it would have been far colder.

Couple things I saw: a dog wearing goggles riding in a motorcycle sidecar. That was funny. A car that plowed into a telephone pole on the wrong side of the street. Not so funny. No one was hurt, but it sure got me wondering what happened. There were a couple older guys in the car (60-70’s) and a couple hundred yards up at the top of the hill there were 2 groups of cyclists stopped on either side of the road. They looked like cycling groups that had stopped to regroup, but I had to wonder if these old guys got distracted, had to swerve to avoid a cyclist and plowed into that pole. It didn’t give me a warm fuzzy feeling about training on this road, but it’s my best option for long uninterrupted distances. I’ll have to find out somehow if this road is too dangerous or not.

So, I got to the furtherest point on my ride and was feeling pretty good. I started getting some fatigue in the legs on the return trip and shortened the ride from ~38 miles to 35, taking the straightest way home. I can still feel it in my legs this morning. I got passed twice on the ride, on hills. Both cyclists blew past me pretty convincingly. I’ve got a long way to go with my hill-climbing apparently.

I was on the trainer in the garage for the whole month of January, so it was really great to get out on the road. Looking forward to more.

Planning Ahead: So, with my first sunny weekend behind me, I’ve got to figure out how I’m going to be ready for a century ride in nine weeks when a 35-mile ride leaves my legs fairly fatigued at this point. I’ve got to say this is a bit of a scary proposition. I’ve plotted out a (very) vague training schedule and I’ll do some more reading ASAP, but I really hope I can pull this off. I should be able to ride 5 days a week, with the big rides on the weekends. If I increase the miles of my big rides each weekend it looks something like this:

Next week: 40 miles

Week 2: 50 miles (3 hours)

Week 3: 55 miles

Week 4: 60 miles

Week 5: 65 miles (4 hours)

Week 6: 70 miles

Week 7: 75 miles

Week 8: 85 miles (5+ hours)

Week 9: Tierra Bella 100 miles (6+ hours @ ~16.66 mph)

These distances would be my Sunday rides, with Saturday rides being somewhat shorter. I’ve got Easter and a 3-year old birthday party to host in there, which may make things a bit dodgy. Weeks 2 and 8 have me concerned as those are the biggest jumps of 10 miles over the previous week. I have no idea if this is a realistic plan. I sure hope so! If anyone reading this has thoughts/suggestions. Please feel free to let me know.

Okay, so next time I’ll do “Training in Style… or Not” and then complaining about my shoes.

Thanks for reading!

Ramping up to get started to get going…

I won’t explain the part how I arrived at this wacky decision to move from casual weekend mountain-biker to wanting to do the Death Ride, but once I got to that point, I knew I had a lot of groundwork to cover just to get started.

First off, my current roadbike is a 1995 Bianchi Premio; a low-end roadbike that has served me well over the years, but with a key fatal flaw: the shifters are on the downtubes, which I knew would be very hard to use on all the downhill sections on any serious ride. I knew I needed to upgrade so I wandered down to my local bike shop, told them what I was planning for 2008 and asked them to show me some bikes. The first bike the guy showed me cost $4k and I didn’t so much laugh as just immediately dismiss it as an option. We moved down the scale, but not as far as I was hoping to. See, my Bianchi Premio cost me a whopping $450 back in the day and from what I’ve been able to find out via Google, it was actually a pretty good bike for the price at the time. Low-end, to be sure, but still, good value for the money. Accordingly, I was thinking, sure I would probably spend more than $500 on a new bike, but not $4k (which I didn’t, just to make a long story short).

Anyway, I pretty much walked out of the store in a sticker-shock trance and asked for 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th opinions from my friends and family. Turns out that if you’re going to get serious about cycling, the initial outlay is somewhat serious as well. I guess I should have been better prepared for that mentally, but hey.. if you’re going in cold with no experience, there’s all kinds of things that’ll catch you by surprise.

I did some test rides, looked at reviews on the internet and generally tried to get myself edumacated. There were a couple of problems: (1) nearly everyone who reviews a bike they’ve purchased tends to say how great it is, making 80-90% of all consumer bike reviews kind of unhelpful. Not completely useless, as they may have tips like “the seat is horrible” or “replaced this part or that part” etc. but the overall review of their bike is almost always how much they like it. (2) when I was doing test rides, all these bikes were so different from the old Bianchi I was used to that I had a hard time comparing them to each other. My test rides were on different roads at different times, on different bikes and the technology was so far ahead of my current bike it was pretty hard to compare. A bike would *really* have to suck bad for me to notice it.

Eventually, I did 2 identical test rides on 2 different bikes (Orbea Onix TdF and Trek Madone 5.1) one after the other to see if I could get any sense of difference between them. For the most part, I couldn’t. The Madone seemed marginally more comfortable, or *possibly* seemed to corner a little better (but that could have been better familiarity with the road on the 2nd ride) it was the bike I knew the most about and as a my wife pointed out, it would probably have a greater resale value if I ever decided to sell it. The salesman said, “Yeah, these are pretty much identical bikes” so I wound up buying the Madone I’d had my eye on from the beginning. Actually, I wanted to buy a cheaper version, but it turns out that the one I was thinking of won’t be available until *after* the Death Ride and this one wasn’t that much more expensive so I bit the bullet and brought the carbon bike home, treating it like a delicate egg (see the picture from my first blog post).

I got to take it out for its first ride this last weekend, in-between rainstorms. Most of my ride-time was solitary, not a lot of other cyclists chose the road I was on, which was great for me as I could figure out those new-fangled shifters, pedals, computer, etc. without looking like a total doofus. In fact, I only got passed by a single cyclist on the last hill home. This guy was younger, slimmer and clearly had years of road experience on me as he passed me up the hill like I was standing still. Naturally, he was riding the Orbea Onix TdF that I hadn’t bought. D’oh!

Next time: training in style… or not.

Inaugural test post

This is the first post for this blog. Just trying it out. This blog is intended to be a public diary of my training for the 2008 Markleeville Death Ride. Never done anything like it before. Not even close. I’ve been a recreational mountain-biker for years and somehow I’ve gotten myself into this crazy plan to do a 129-mile, 15,000-foot climb all-day endurance extravaganza. We’ll see how it goes.

One of the first orders of business was to get a new roadbike, as the old one was seriously unprepared (just like me!) for the upcoming event. I’d tell the story of picking out this bike, blah, blah, blah, but time is of the essence. In order to test this blogging thing, let’s try and insert a picture of the new bike:

It’s a 2008 Trek Madone 5.1, picked up at Summit Bicycles in Los Gatos, CA. I’ve got a few stories to tell re: buying the new bike, but I’ll save those for a “real” post.

I found a cool little program from Adam Tow’s blog called ”Klimb” that gave me this: the profile from my first ride on the new bike:

It was kind of a pain to figure out how to get the profile out of Klimb and into a blog, but not bad for a first attempt. Btw, I have no idea why the “blue-green” portions aren’t identical, since it’s the same hill (Camden Ave.) I rode on going out and coming back. Like I said, I’m still learning the Klimb software, so maybe I did something wrong.

Okay, I’ve tried out links, photos, tags and categories. I hope this thing works!